Is the h60 a good choice with the 8350?

VayranApr 14, 2013, 5:10 PM

I'm interested in getting an corsair H60 while it's on sale on new egg and putting it on my 8350. Before I buy it though I have a few questions.

Will I have any trouble putting it into a fractal design define R4? What kind of reliable OC would I expect to get out of it? (my mobo is the gigabyte 990FXA-UD3) If you don't think the H60 is the best choice for 50$, what would you recommend? Thanks!

It is no frills as a liquid cooler, but Corsair packages it with one of their best fans resulting in great acoustics and cooling. And Best Buy has it for $55, if you are an American.

While I am not familiar with the case you mention, it does have a rear exhaust, which means you can remove the back fan and replace it with the radiator and fan if you can't affix it to your case ceiling or somewhere else.

1. Nope, from what I know of the R4 you could mount it in three different places.2. Depends on the chip, depends how far you want to push it and your personal threshold for temperatures. No one can answer that for you.

3. I dont think its the best choice, the old H60 model performs on par with a 212 EVO, and I don't think the new fan and thicker tubing will have done much to change that. IMO, save up $15 more and get a big air cooler like an NH-D14, that will get you performance comparable to a H100i.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835608018

1. Nope, from what I know of the R4 you could mount it in three different places.2. Depends on the chip, depends how far you want to push it and your personal threshold for temperatures. No one can answer that for you.

3. I dont think its the best choice, the old H60 model performs on par with a 212 EVO, and I don't think the new fan and thicker tubing will have done much to change that. IMO, save up $15 more and get a big air cooler like an NH-D14, that will get you performance comparable to a H100i.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835608018

Thanks for the reply! I will definitely look around to find a good deal on one. Are their other air coolers that have similar performance around the same price point?

Between it and the Noctua, you will pretty much get the best cooling that air can offer.

FYI, you just recommended a case fan, which is optimized for air flow instead of static pressure. Ideally for radiators and heatsinks you want a fan that can force air through the venting. Otherwise the airflow takes the path of least resistance which is around the venting.

Anyways, in my opinion if you are going to spend ~$80 on an air cooler, you might as well spend the little more for a great liquid cooler to take advantage of its benefits. Those humongous air coolers add two and a half pounds of extruding metal to a plastic circuit board. That is a recipe for something to get broken, especially if the PC is moved. They also take up some premium space in the middle of the motherboard and can force you to buy low profile RAM. Finally, those dual fan setups accumulate dust inside and can be difficult to clean, though this can be a problem with liquid cooler radiators if they are not set up with dust accumulation in mind.

Don't get me wrong, air cooling is a fine option, and if it fits your needs better, great. I was able to spend $55 and get the advantage of liquid cooling and pretty much as good of a stable overclock on a i5 3570K as you can get (4.5 ghz), so my experience favors this.

EDIT: And I am aware of the need for static pressure instead of CFM when it comes to radiator and heatsink usage.Good alternative fans to use would be Silverstone Air Penetrators, Noctua NF-F12's and Scythe Gentle Typhoons. Though the Slipstreams mentioned might do a better job since it comparatively has greater airflow area since the fan hub is smaller.

Honestly H60 and H80 arent worth the cost unless you want tell everyone you have it "watercooled"

Your certainly entitled to your opinion, one thing I will say is that i do not do anything just to say I have "insert cool tech here". I am no ones cheerleader.

I use them on all my mobile van units I build. The idle temps are 15 to 20 deg lower with these units. Now these machines do spend a lot of idle time. But when they work they operate wide open using multiple threads on proprietary software, multiple monitors (at least 3), hipo vid cards, capture cards and the overlays required to put it all together, AND all in one cabinet. they make plenty of heat. I use these little corsair units all by themselves as compared to what we used before which was a good quality cpu fan <Insert whatever fancy unit you want here, I tried so many i can not remember all their cool high tech sounding names> along with a pair of 120 mm's moving air through, again insert all kinds of fancy names here. More fans were needed many times. And yes weve tried these supposedly marvelous Hyper 212 EVO's, i really dont get everyones love for those performance or otherwise, they eat up a lot of space too. Granted I have to account for extremely variable air pressure and temps in the front and rear of the van partition (basically an office inside the van with a work shop on the back side of the van, what we call the rear partition). Basically, we kept adding fans until we could get it to stay at a reasonable number and these vans also have AC in the office partition.

Even with this simple little H60 setup that I use, the temp drops have been great. Idle is very nice, the machine practically stays cold. Full load i see 15 to 20 deg difference so I personally think they are an extremely good deal for their price point. Whether you want to believe a word I say is up to you, But for me, I dont think, I know. And thats why i threw one on my rig. There are better units than these out there to be sure but for the price of these entry level units, I will take them over the air coolers any day. IF I need something more i can add something to tune the cooling a little and my rig still wont sound like a harrier jump jet. YMMV I have a lot of these around, threw one on my personal rig starting with the FX4100 and wont ever go back. I would go to the larger radiator set up though, if i ever needed it. For my rig right now as it sits, not even close. 50 C saturated after an 8 hour run on several different burn in software progs. As for choosing the Corsair unit over the other closed loop setups out there, it was a simple matter of what was on sale.

One thing that always has to be remembered is that the cooling system is a combo of several things from case design down to the fans you dont think about like the ones in the PSU, it all works together. This is just my experience with this system, it is not an attack on anyone..

I have not been around here long, is there a "rig builder" per say so people can compare rigs easily?You have a nice rig by the way, here are my current specs....

AMD 8320 O/C @ 4.2ghz (have not had time to push it harder yet), 16 GB Corsair 2000mhz ram, EVGA overclocked 2gb 660ti ,1 TB 10,000 RPM Velociraptor , Two- 2 TB WD Greens in RAID config, Dual blue ray ROM/burners/1 is a scribe, ASUS Sabertooth 990FX, ASUS Xonar DS and of course corsair hydro cooled. Oh yeah, to be fair, i did add a <300 rpm Kingston twin fan memory cooler just to make sure I had a little air movement over the mem chips as they are kind of up against the back of a bluray drive. Win 7 64 Ultimate. The system is quiet, I love it.